AT THE BEACH

What are they, those burrowing crustaceans,
the ones my son and I unbeach each summer
building sandcastles? Thumb-large
helmets with dainty, iridescent feet
and as far as I can see no eyes,
no head, no front or back at all, only
the shove and pull of the waves,
or only the quick, attentive gulls, who love them
just as they would love us, my son and me, if they could,
and who, the truth be told, cannot name us either.


LIVES OF THE ANIMALS

One neighbor's got a heeler
named Job; another's got just
a snapshot or two, a frou-frou,
nappy poodle, yapping
and vanished without a trace.

Cats, if they survive
to adulthood, fare better.
though there was an honest shortage
of kittens one summer,
thanks to the hordes of owls and hawks.

Then there are the weeds,
the stick-tights and teasels,
brain-festering cheatgrass depth charges
down the ears, the eye-slashing
barely visible star thistle spines

There are bored boys
with BB and pellet guns and drivers
on the country roads
with nowhere to swerve to.
There's terrible heat and terrible cold.

For the rest of us—the biped,
broad-nailed, featherless master race—
there's only black ice and bad driving,
deep fats and a government's erector set
experiments with nuclear bombs

***

Then there's the annual spring plague
of ticks, and the nightly sessions
on the living room floor,
grooming like chimps. First,
the dogs, then the cats,

then the kids, then last of all,
later, the two of us, the tender skin
at the base of the scalp,
the tenderer skin of the crotch,
and once, my lover

plucked from the tip of my ear,
with a divot of skin,
a tick already fastened on
and fattening with my blood.
She kissed the wound there

and did not stop
kissing, but held the tick
between her thumb and forefinger
all through the love that followed,
then expelled what I'd left her

in the toilet, wrapped the tick
in a wad of tissue,
dropped it there too,
and came to bed.
All that night I was moving

***

in my sleep, running the dank
weedy channels after pheasants
or stalking shrews and voles
and meadow mice that abound here.
All that night the scent of skin

was on me, the scent of bodies
opened toward the blood.
By morning I'd have sworn
it was all a dream. I was
the only human animal awake

at that hour. In a wedge of sun
the cats lay tangled
and rumbling. The dog's tail thumped,
a tentative knock as I rose.
But there was the speck

on my pillow, and in the pale light
of the bathroom, a black mole
afloat in a sea of dross
and sodden tissue. I held my finger
down to the surface, and the tick scrambled on.

Now the dog's up and yawning,
the cats yammer for their food.
True to form, there's Job
outside, his hide a matted mass
of burrs and thorns,

***

behind his ear a cluster
of ticks swollen fat as grapes.
I call him to the door. He's meek
and grateful for attention.
I scratch his chin

and nestle that rescued tick
deep in the fur around his neck.
I make coffee. I slice a peach
and take my breakfast on the porch,
where the cats rub figure-eights

around my ankles, where the dogs
await a nibble of toast. The sun is warm
and the breeze is cool. This is the world,
my brothers, we enter yet again,
our arms flung open wide.